


One Heart For Every Person

by GothMoth



Series: Ectobers Ectoplasmic Splatters [1]
Category: Danny Phantom
Genre: Angst, Dissociation, Gen, I'm not dead!, Panic Attack, Unreliable Narrator
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-10-09
Updated: 2019-10-09
Packaged: 2020-11-27 23:55:41
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,333
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20957039
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/GothMoth/pseuds/GothMoth
Summary: Danny’s not dead, his heartbeat says so. But the mind plays tricks and his very existence defies reality. The universe will always find some way to get its way.





	One Heart For Every Person

**Author's Note:**

> 2019 Day 1: What If?

Ever since the accident, there were days where Danny would just lay on his bed, in Phantom form, and listen and feel and follow the beat of his heart. Assuring himself that he wasn’t really dead or even half-dead really. Because honestly? If he was half dead his heart would beat slower or less frequently, right? It doesn’t so he’s fine, he’s good, he’s okay; he’s alive. Sometimes he just really needed to, y’know, make sure. 

Tonight was one of those ‘let me just check’ nights. Even after all these months he still held his breath, until he picked up on the familiar thumping. Becoming very aware of heartbeats was not something Danny expected from teen-hood. 

Floating on his back just above his bed, staring at the ceiling with his hand on his chest. Letting everything else in the world fall away except the feeling of his heart. Everything else looks as if seen out of the corner of his eye. Colours and shapes and textures, free from identity or categorisation. They pulse and swirl and mix together, thrumming and change in tune with his heart. Until noting but a pulsating mix of paint on canvas. The spots of red or green stains standing out the sharpest, seeming like knife slashes through otherwise soft blankets of colour. 

Sounds coming across as if heard from rooms away, under blankets of static and rings. Until his heartbeats thump thump thump drowns it all out, becoming near painful and almost drowning. Every other sound coming across likes distorted shrieks and wails, white noise. While his bodies a string cord pulled taught against a blasting speaker. Every thump a resounding shock, no matter how expected or hoped for. 

Smells mingle and merge till they become repulsive and grotesque. Moving to be nothing but the accents to cooper and lime, so thick his throat feels stuffed full of cotton and liquid. Nose hairs twitching as they pick up on each new sent and add them to the soup. At first, he can pick up on what it might smell like, never why the smell exists, just what it may be. Chemical lavender, salty sweat, stale dust, sticky talc, harsh burn of flower pollen, and high-grade rubber. Till a paint mixer is shoved in the soup of his mind, making salty rust and stale lemon. Chemical copper and burning lime. Ice water metal and out of date lemon-lime liquor. The smell of the universe. But he hardly pays it any mind. 

Tongue stuffy and full of fluff, too big for his mouth. The sharps of teeth, textures of ridges and pumps and cuts. Taste is the least of all, just cool enamel, saliva and lemony flesh. Turning to static and medical numbing agents. 

Pricks skirt over skin, twitching a finger or limb here or there. Before moving to heavy lead in veins and the stiff pull and crush of hands around a throat. Waves shoot across, under and over, skin; in-tune with the hammer of a heart. Slamming into finger and toe tips with knives of near pain. Followed by rain patter across everything, seemingly like they're splashing into pools of water. Sending ripples across his surface to slam and war with each other.

There’s an underlying ache to move, to stretch, to bend, to twist. It becomes a scream, an overwhelming need. But he can’t move, can’t tell what needs to move, where it all is. Becoming a wet cloud of static pulses. Heavy like a puppet stuffed with mercury and balloons overfilled with desperate screams. Light like all his organs have been hallowed out and feathers floating down streams. Leaving everything a wood marionette held up by strings of ice, dominated by speakers booming out vibrations and pulse. Strings of hair will stab and pull at his face as they float about in the air. His suit like a vise grip around every inch of flesh, holding in the thrashing and twisting and winding of what qualifies as his self. The cold of his core blooming and opening up like a late-blooming flower that still somehow manages to be the most beautiful one of all. Sucking away his breath and nearly overpowering the harsh hammer of a heart, sending fear and terror shooting through him. Making him flail, and then it’s all gone. 

He’s floating upright in the air, knees slightly bent and arms dangling down. Eyes wide yet unseeing as they refocus. Ears pop and sound explodes. With a harsh swallow and opening dried lips, the thick cotton gets stuffed down his throat; into the pit of his guts. 

Moving a stiff numb arm up, gently pushing fingers against the spandex of his suit, deeper to his flesh, to its deepest destination of heart muscle and pumping liquids. He would kiss it if he could, but the whispers of touch or a gentle fingers caress, will have to do. Be enough. It never is, but it has to be. 

Slowly floating back to the ground and staggering, wavering slightly, at the return of touch on his body. Making him feel disgust, it’s a body of the dead, something where a heart doesn’t belong. He doesn’t want it to go away so he changes back. Always irrationally fearful his ghost self will corrode away the muscle. Like every other time, the return of gravities pull makes all of him collapse into a pile of limbs, aches, spinning senses, and the heavy pull of sleep. 

He rolls over and spreads his limbs out across the carpeting, feeling each prick and pull of the little loops and frayed ends. Feels the rattle of air in his lungs. The creak of bones being pushed and moved. Sloshing of stomach acids and saliva. Blinking away the dryness to his eyes and sniffling, moving away the stiffness in his eyelashes and nose hairs. His teeth still feel too textured and like their roughness will tear the insides of his lips to shreds. That always takes hours to go away. But sleep always comes easy. 

But not tonight, as he gets up and unlocks his door. Pushing through the air like maple syrup and pins. Drunkenly staggering down the stairs, footsteps landing heavy. It takes a while for him to realise he’s at the bottom, the world tilting forwards even though he’s still. Before everything snaps back upright as he blinks. Head-turning to the kitchen before walking in. 

Staring down at the ECG is parents brought home that morning. The reason he couldn’t take his mind off hearts and blood and pulses and ectoplasm. How his spine and ribs gripped too tight around his organs, his heart. How he had to be Phantom, had to make all those organs and bones go away. Leave his heart alone. 

Picking up the machine and rubbing his fingers over it. At first slow, like he was handling the most beautiful fine china. Before ravaging digits over it like a hyena starved for centuries. Abruptly stopping to breath heavy and ears ringing. 

Tearing his shirt off with such haste and aggression he could swear the fabric would cut him out of spite. Staring at the abused fabric in his hand, willing his clenching hands to just let go. 

The fabric sounds like a thunderclap as it hits the floor. He doesn’t want to move, disturb the aftereffect of waiting for lightning. But his eyes move back to the table, the ECG. So he slumps into the chair and screws up his numb face, one eye near closed the other wide with an arched brow. Before grabbing the electrodes and sticking them to his flesh. It feels like a small blessing that they stick through the sweat, can cling regardless of all the scar tissue. 

His finger hovers over the on switch, twitching downwards occasionally. His arms and fingers feel stiff, like there’s nothing he could do to make them move. Like someone had replaced them with wood and metal beams. 

Putting his head on the table, feeling his cold breath chill the wood and prick at his skin. Letting his fingers and arms fall like soft rubber filled with soup. The machine whirling to life, to check him for the same. 

At first, he hears nothing, the sound slowly coming into focus. A slowly approaching ambulance in his mind. That, surely, won’t make it to the scene of the crime in time. Because the drivers more focused on eating his cheeseburger and pulling off the pickles with disgust. 

So he lays there, waiting for the sound to worm its way through the air. For it to skitter and crawl through his ears. For his mind to put down its dollar menu scraps and catch up with the winding road of sound. Waiting for the quiet thumping beats, the ticking away of life. 

Only for every single muscle to seize, to grip him in an arresting hug. Body snapped to sit back upright, like his spine was no longer capable of being bent. The flatline piercing shriek cutting through the water of his mind. Pickles falling to the ambulance floor as it crashes into a bomb. He’d run from this if only he could. Limbs served off in the mental crash. Before twitching and wrapping his arms around his chest. Was it all in his mind? Convincing himself there was sound, feeling, something? 

Wrapping his ankles around the legs of the chair is all that keeps him from falling over as the world tilts, shapes waver, and colours bleed. Everything turns to fuzz except the ECG and its little green line. The sound coming in and out of focus, as if trying to force it to change. Make beeps out of shrieks and screaming whines. 

His throat spasms making him cough, choke and gag. Moving his hands to claw into his throat, choking out a whisper, “believe it or not, I have a heart”. Trying to damn the machine, convince it, make it tell the truth. It marches on with the single tone. The painful single tone that threatens to tear apart every muscle fibre, particle of air, drop of blood, inside him. Does any of that actually exist? 

Beginning to shake violently he does the only thing he can think of, as his bones and muscles and senses seem to fall away from him. Landing in a puddle on the floor, a gory mess of what was supposed to be inside of him. Staring down at the floor as he transforms into Phantom, he swears he can actually see the visceral mess on the floor in flashes. Red....red and green...red and green....green and red...green and red...green. Pulsing and wiggling organs, sharp jabs of bones and blood weeping out endlessly like a fountain. Blinking eyes, teeth-gnashing tongues, wafting waves of aromas. The whole mess fizzing and bubbling to a sickly toxic green pool. Uniformed and all the same, the same in such a way that nothing could be discerned as belonging to anything specific. Just a disconcerting mess. 

Jerking suddenly from a beep slamming him in the side of the face. Leaving the feeling of a numb stinging hand mark, making him stagger to stand up. Hands pulled to his chest again, the mess on the ground seemingly crawling up his legs, plucking through his jumpsuit to stab his flesh as it goes. Eventually coating all of himself in green cold wet liquid slime. While he stares down at the beeping, the moving lines. His limbs feel wrung out like bland old tasteless chewing gum. But he feels the beeping in every inch of his body, shivering with every sound of the machine. It’s like someone is jamming a syringe full of liquid nitrogen into that wad of gum, reinvigorating it with flavour at the drop of every unassuming beep. 

Grabbing the machine and pulling it to his chest. Changing back only to be haunted by the telltale flat line of heartlessness. Changing again to soothe away the shrieking with beeps. Changing to will realty to change, only it doesn’t. 

Ghost,

Human,

Beeping,

Shrieking,

Heart,

Heartless,

Saving,

Crashing,

Working,

Error,

Alive, 

DEAD. 

He swears he can hear his own heart singing, ‘I wonder if you fear me, I wonder if you feel me, I wonder if you hear me’. 

He lets the machine clatter to the table, electrodes yanking off painfully. Paying no mind to wondering just how they even stayed attached through his jumpsuit. He shoves his finger against the off switch, as he’s floating in the air and up through the ceiling. Paying no attention to where he is, seeing nothing but colourless fuzz and hard edges. Watching the machine grow smaller and smaller. Letting the sky pull him up like millions of children’s hands clamouring over a doll. 

A cloud pushes into him and he lets it take him. Feeling the moisture cling to his suit, turning to pinprick icicles by the cold of him. Letting himself change back to fall, plummet out of the empty air. The knowledge of the night wrapping his senses in a blanket of soundless shrieks and screams and wails and...and truth. 

Everything catching up with him as he instinctively became Phantom again, as he always did, seconds before impacting the hard surface with his back. Like the world itself got whiplash from the sudden loss of gravity’s pull. The shock of the missing impact clearing his mind. Every life had one heart and he was two. Two existences, two beings. Feeling bitter, crushing and ache. So two hearts is not the way it works right? One keeps on beating, therefore, the other one gets the electric shock. One got the defibrillator, while the other got abandoned to rot. 

Floating to lay on top of the roof, whispering, “I am two and I have to dissociate away reality”. The universe whispering back at him, ‘don’t you think having two hearts is too intense’. He shakes his head numbly, no, no he really doesn’t. 

**End**.

**Author's Note:**

> What if Danny only had a beating heart in ghost form.


End file.
